This article is a description and comparison of Polish and Arabic
taboo-based intensifiers in terms of both the semantic domains from
which they are derived and their level of desemanticization. For this
objective, four domains were selected: (1) death, (2) religion, God, and
demons, (3) sexuality, and (4) family. Within those domains an array of
linguistic forms were analysed with the aim of examining to what extent
they retained traces of the original meaning. Another question to
elucidate is whether the transition from one category to another in the
process of semantically-driven grammaticalization is accompanied by the
loss of the taboo element of these lexemes.